Matthew Meyer, a PhD in anthropology who's studied Shasta County's pot market, belatedly e-mailed me his thoughts:

Hi Marc,

I'm disappointed to see that the Bob Williams in question is not the reactionary supervisor from Tehama, but the former professor from UCLA.

A couple of observations are in order. One is that the text's purported concern--figuring out what's the most rational path should California make over-the-counter cannabis legal--is really a launching pad for a series of claims whose truer purpose seems to be making information-light voters think that pot is really, really bad.

Williams hits most of the old and newly recycled anti-cannabis points: it's not your parents' pot, real science says it makes your IQ lower, etc. My sense is that, zealot or not, he found a halfway credible source of misinformation on the subject and ran with it.

The other main observation I'd make is that Williams speaks as though legalization would introduce some force in our midst that we've never encountered before, and he utterly fails to discuss the problems that exist with our current approach. But the question is not, Do we want a zombie-inducing substance to be unleashed on our highways and youth? It's more like, What do we do to mitigate the potential negative impacts of (already existing) cannabis cultivation, distribution, and consumption? Williams looks really out of touch in not considering this aspect at all.

So it's pretty much the opposite approach I'd like to see the more enlightened graybeards of the area taking: it seems to give more reason to those who want to keep their heads in the sand. Maybe Bob and I can debate?


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